Blogs and Commentary

Munoz: Stanford's East Coast Fall Trip

Stanford goalie Lyndsey Munoz has blogged for LaxMagazine.com
since her sophomore season with the Stanford women's lacrosse team.
She's now in her senior year. Read her previous blogs here.

It's been a while since I've given an update, so first I will
let you all know what I've been up to for the past few months. This
summer I had an awesome opportunity to hold two internships, one at
a mobile security company called KoolSpan as the marketing intern,
and the other at US Lacrosse as the national teams intern. I gained
so much experience from being able to work two different
internships, and am so grateful for the opportunity I was
given.

Now, at Stanford, we are about to begin our fourth week of fall
ball, and it still hasn't hit me yet that this is my last one. Time
really does go by so fast in college, you don't even realize. This
year we have nine freshmen and one transfer, putting our roster
number at 31. This is the largest team I have been apart of at
Stanford, and I'm even still in the process of getting to know all
the newbies. So far, it has been a really good environment, and I'm
really excited to get to know them more and more as the fall
continues.

We just returned from our annual East Coast trip, where we went
to my home state of MARYLAND! We played Saturday in the Navy
Tournament and then Sunday at US Lacrosse's Stars & Stripes
event at Towson. Even though it wasn't exactly my home, driving
through downtown Annapolis made me feel nostalgic as you can always
spot the St. Mary's Church (located next to my alma mater)
no matter where you are. Unfortunately, the weather didn't exactly
cooperate with us. We left pretty soaked by the last game.

At Navy we faced some tough competition, playing North Carolina,
Syracuse, Delaware and Boston College. There were definitely ups
and downs throughout the day, but considering it's still early in
our fall ball, we played well. Most importantly, we had a great
opportunity to play against some of the best teams in the country
and we now know how we can get better. There was also a great
environment at Navy, with many East Coast families all around and
even past teammates as well. In the UNC game I got to see fellow
St. Mary's alum Megan Ward. In the BC game I got to play against
for the first time another high school teammate and one of my best
friends, Kelly McNelis. Yes, she did score on me, but it was kind
of lucky I guess.

The next day we played Towson and Team USA at
Stars & Stripes. We came out strong in the Towson game, and
it was really exciting to see the freshmen making such an impact in
particular. This game was especially fun for me as my goalie coach
from high school, Michael Molster, is Towson's volunteer assistant
coach. I know every time I saved a ball he was probably yelling at
attackers on the outside and silently cheering on the inside. We
played Towson to a close game, and then played USA directly
after.

It can be pretty intimidating to play against the national team.
However, when you're being shot on by the best in the world, I was
just happy to have made some saves at all. They indeed have some
amazing shooters and players, and we all had a great time getting
to play against them and learn from them. Overall, it was a good
trip, a chance for us to compete against the best and grow closer
together as a team. Moving forward, we have our alumni game this
coming weekend, and the next we have another chance to play outside
competition during our playday Oct. 26 against Cal, Fresno State
and UC Davis.